1 Introduction

IDLWAVE is a package which supports editing source files written in
the Interactive Data Language (IDL), and running IDL as an inferior shell1. It is a feature-rich replacement for the IDLDE
development environment included with IDL, and uses the full power of
Emacs to make editing and running IDL programs easier, quicker, and more
structured.

IDLWAVE consists of two main parts: a major mode for editing IDL
source files (idlwave-mode) and a mode for running the IDL
program as an inferior shell (idlwave-shell-mode). Although
one mode can be used without the other, both work together closely to
form a complete development environment. Here is a brief summary of
what IDLWAVE does:

Smart code indentation and automatic-formatting.

Three level syntax highlighting support.

Context-sensitive display of calling sequences and keywords for more
than 1000 native IDL routines, extensible to any additional number of
local routines, and already available with many pre-scanned libraries.

IDLWAVE is the distant successor to the idl.el and
idl-shell.el files written by Chris Chase. The modes and files
had to be renamed because of a name space conflict with CORBA's
idl-mode, defined in Emacs in the file cc-mode.el.

In this manual, each section ends with a list of related user options.
Don't be confused by the sheer number of options available: in most
cases the default settings are just fine. The variables are listed here
to make sure you know where to look if you want to change anything. For
a full description of what a particular variable does and how to
configure it, see the documentation string of that variable (available
with C-h v). Some configuration examples are also given in the
appendix.

Footnotes

[1] IDLWAVE can also be used
for editing source files for the related WAVE/CL language, but with only
limited support.